rolling with the USBR

July 11th -- Woke up to a hard frost this morning. Layer of ice on everything ............ burrrrrrr.
So happy to have had my cozy sleeping bag last night.

Another day out in the Middle Fork John Day River valley. No field work today though.
We spent the morning in a meeting with folks from the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Warm Springs Tribe. We got together to talk about monitoring activities and responsibilities. This was a must since the USBR designed the "restoration projects" that are going in on the tribe's land that we are going to be monitoring. The meeting was good diplomatically.

After the meeting the USBR guys took us on a tour of some of their other engineered restoration downstream from the tribe's land. All in the name of improving salmon habitat. One was a heavy machinery project that rechannelized a segment of a tributary (Boulder Creek) and the other was log jams they installed on the MFJD on the Nature Conservancy Land. Interesting day. If you want my opinion on these projects email me --

After all of that we were back in camp by 5:30pm -- Pat and I walked down the gravel road from our camp to an abandoned homestead. Solid log cabin walls and a barn about to tip over. Very picturesque.

Then we hiked up the steep knoll behind the cabin and enjoyed the view of the valley from the top -- while pasture grasses danced in the wind. IT was a "sound of music" moment.

Flowers from the day (from the TNC meadows)